Moby and BrainPOP in Mumbai

Moby and BrainPOP in Mumbai! At the end of January and beginning of February, I had the privilege to take an educational tour through seven cities in India. While visiting schools, universities, educational reform organization and companies, I shared my love for BrainPOP with everyone! One particularly interesting government school in Mumbai was run in conjunction with a community based project called Muktangan. This school not only educates k-8 students, but also houses a teacher training institute that employs many of the progressive approaches we see in the best schools in the US. I noticed a number of children on computers, so I shared a BrainPOP trial with the school and asked for their feedback.

Last week, Uma Kogekar, the instructional technologist at one of the seven Muktangan schools, sent me a message describing teachers’ reaction after a few weeks of using BrainPOP. Ritu, a faculty member in the Education Department who works with pre-service teachers, says, “The trainees will use it to practice grammar!” This was echoed by Avni, a faculty member from the Language Dept, “BrainPOPESL can be used for English proficiency classes with our teachers!” Jennifer, also from the Language Department wrote, “We showed the Shakespeare movie to the kids as we are doing Merchant of Venice and King Lear this week. It was a great introduction.” Hema, from the Science Department enjoyed the closed captioning feature: “The science movies are very useful especially as they have the captioning option. If we do not understand the English we can pause and read.” Shubra already has plans for the animations with her math students: “They are very useful and will be used for revision this month.” Pranali and Swarup, school librarians observed kids while playing the BrainPOP games. “They enjoyed the games very much and are excited to continue exploring.”

As you can tell, the diversity of responses from the educators at Muktangan remind us about the versatility of BrainPOP. It is exciting to hear how BrainPOP is helping both students in the school, and preservice teachers who are learning English. We look forward to hearing more from them. If you have more questions about Muktangan or want to share how you are using BrainPOP with your students or adult learners, please Let us know!